New version of color wheel

September 12th, 2007 | 3 Comments »

Luan O’Carroll of Xoetrope has been very active lately working on bug fixes and enhancements to the Xoetrope Color Wheel. It’s a Swing component that allows choosing colors in a very nice and visually appealing way, and it can be used in JColorChooser or as a part of larger UI (see video links below).

The latest additions available in the XUI itself as well as in the development version of Substance 4.1 add mouse-wheel support for the color wheel and the brightness / saturation sliders. This screencast shows the new features in action, and this screencast shows how the color wheel can be used in a larger UI.

In short, you can use the mouse wheel on the color wheel itself to play with the hue, and on the sliders to play with the brightness and saturation of the selected color. In addition, holding the Control key while wheeling over the sliders will apply the brightness / saturation on the color wheel itself. Here is how the color wheel looks like in default mode:

Color chooser Xoetrope color wheel - default

Here is how it looks like with decreased brightness:

Color chooser Xoetrope color wheel - decreased brightness

And here is how it looks like with decreased saturation:

Color chooser Xoetrope color wheel - decreased saturation

If you want to reuse this component in your code (like the Colorspace of Teppefall), make sure that you read and follow the terms of XUI license (identical to Mozilla Public License) in XUI.license of Substance distribution.

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3 Comments on “New version of color wheel”

  1. 1 Pierre said at 6:19 am on September 20th, 2007:

    Hi Kirill,

    just thinking aloud – couldn’t the app at http://www.xoetrope.com/resources/xui/video/ColroWheel2/ColroWheel2.html or something along the lines of it, be used to visually create custom Substance themes?

    Regards,
    Pierre

  2. 2 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 9:31 am on September 20th, 2007:

    Pierre,

    A UI for creating custom Substance themes is welcome. Unfortunately, i do not have time in the foreseeable future to invest in this, but i will gladly answer any questions if somebody steps up to the challenge.

    Note that in general i’m moving towards skins, and my current tentative plans are to remove everything else (themes, watermarks, …) as publicly accessible APIs in SubstanceLookAndFeel class in version 5.0 (next fall). So, such an editor would have to allow defining a complete skin. That is even harder :)

  3. 3 Pierre said at 10:18 am on September 20th, 2007:

    Fair enough,
    when I have some time on hands I’ll definitely consider stepping up to the challenge.
    Interesting though are your comments about removing public access to everything but skins in Substance 5. I for one definitely value the extent to which one can pick and choose, if you will, in the current version of Substance – especially the ability to do so at runtime. By then however, hopefully I’ll have made enough time to create a custom skin builder UI :)